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Monday, October 31, 2005

Some talk in past few days

Past few days there were lots of talks by very eminent and/or very knowledgeable/experienced people. I will post about them over some posts. Here are the two of them.

P. Anandan of MSR@IIIT: If you have done some work in Vision and specially in registration etc you probably know this person. He is the head of MSR India, and is undoubtedly one of the most successful researchers India ever produced(Ok enuf I understand). The talk was about the kind of work MSR has been doing worldwide and specially about plans of MSR India. MSR India is looking for some young researchers to join them and work on some of the most uptodate technologies and evolving areas. The talk was simply superb, Anandan is probably the best speaker I ever witnessed. He was excited to see many students interested in Research jobs. One of his quote "You probably have to wait for 5 more years before you can buy your Benz but then you will be buying a better model" Again if you have seen Siggraph videos or papers, you probably know the quality of work by MSR people, MSR probably produces the largest number of paper compared to any institutes. I hope MSR creates some interest in students in India for going for higher education.

Talk by Mark Herbert(?) Of Seirra Atlantik @ ISB: Just after the talk by a Researcher, I had the opportunity to attend a entirely different kind of talk, a talk by a successful Management guy. He was again a great speaker, his slides had lot of striking figures and facts which I was totally unaware of. I was just wondering if blogging was ok for such a talk, but some points could be shared harmlessly,1) Every $1 of money spent by US on Outsourcing gets them a value of $1.46, of which Indian side gets 55cents and company makes a pure profit of something like 14/15 cents, after removing all the cost incurred in transfer of work etc.2) The rates of work India have remained quite stable for past some time, this is mainly due to large number of freshers who are joining jobs regularly and who keeps the cost low due to their lack of experience. (Looks like a point to think upon)3) A large number of Developing countries are gearing up for a competition to India/China in offshoring bussiness, this includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and some African countries.4) India offers the second cheapest place to get the work done, just after vietnam, China is third.5) Their no great loss of jobs in US do to outsourcing, atleast the people don't remain unemployed for long.6) The loss of job happens not mainly because of offshoring but because of increase in Productivity7) Based on point 6 India would be loosing a large number of call center jobs soon, when the software matures to handle lot of such work automatically.... Many point I forgot. :(